The Gulf

The Making of an American Sea

By Jack E. Davis

As devout Roman Catholics, the Spanish often named a place for the religious day on which they discovered it. If the expedition had made landfall farther north, then Delaware or New Jersey, still waiting for spring flowers, might be known today as Florida.

(Davis 2017, 45)

On down the road was Panama City, the largest panhandle city next to Pensacola, with about ten thousand inhabitants in 1930. Like Pensacola, it was located on the north side of its bay. The same as Pensacolans, residents seeking a respite from their daily lives (which, for many, working at the local paper mill) started crossing the bay to the beach. Cottages, a dance casino, and hotels soon went up Gulf-side. A Birmingham developer bought four thousand feet of oceanfront next to Highway 98, sectioned his parcel into lots, and sold thirty-seven in the first week of the offering, all of them to Alabamians.

Floridians on the peninsula hardly paid attention to the panhandle, apart from its majority reign in the legislature despite its minority population size. As Harvey Jackson points out, a state promotional pamphlet distributed in 1937 didn’t bother mentioning the beaches at Pensacola or Panama City. Floridians were less intimate with their panhandle than were Alabamians. From early on, panhandle folk initiated serious agitating for secession from Florida to join Alabama’s cradle of “southernness.” These were, for the most part, middle-class, Protestant, white people. They kept the beaches segregated, but for that matter, so did white Mississippians, Louisianans, Texans, and, indeed, the transplanted Yankees down on the Florida peninsula.

(Davis 2017, 259)

“They are called typhoons,” Joseph Conrad’s Captain MacWhirr explains in a letter to his wife, to which she stifles a yawn, uninterested in “all these ship affairs.” A principal character in Typhoon, MacWhirr is honoring the mariner’s practice of referring to hurricanes in regional vernacular. His letter arrives from the China Sea in the northwestern Pacific. If he had been writing from the South Pacific or Indian Ocean he would have bored his wife with that region’s nomenclature, “cyclone.” A hurricane is a “hurricane” only in the eastern Pacific and Atlantic-and, too, the Gulf.

It is so, in part, because of the Yucatán Maya. They paid tribute to a no-nonsense, one-legged god named Huracan, the divine source of wind and storms and, appropriately, birth and destruction. Their neighbors to the east and southeast, the Taíno and Carib, each had a deity of similar name and disposition. From them the Spanish got a word, huracán, for those incomprehensible tempests they discovered in the New World—acts of God, as they saw them, that wrecked their ships and settlements.

(Davis 2017, 335-336)

[Don Tristan De Luna Y Arellano]’s pilots convinced him to plant the flag of empire and cross of Christianity beside present-day Pensacola Bay, which they called Ochuse. It had a lofty bluff and deep water, and in Santa Rosa Island it had a physical barricade against storms and the sea. Luna later wrote, “I took a good port.” The pilots said it was the best in the Indies. As if to prove them wrong, a September hurricane roared through. The ships were lying at anchor in the bay, presumably safely. But the wind ambushed them from the north. Doubly unfortunate, Luna had not yet ordered the provisions off-loaded.

The storm left behind a dictionary definition of disaster. Ten ships went down. The number of dead is unknown. Within a year, the frantic settlers abandoned the endeavor. The viceroy declared the storm disheveled Florida panhandle off limits to Spanish settlement, and it remained that way for 139 years. Except for a hurricane, Pensacola would have been the first European city permanently established in the present-day United States. But, during the moratorium on colonizing the panhandle, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés settled St. Augustine, giving the first-city distinction to the East Coast.